The ConsumHERist - Free Advertising

Posted on | April 30, 2008 |

by Delia Passi

Women are natural communicators. Put a bunch of us together, and almost all of us will have something to add to the conversation. We have opinions, and we like to share them.

This tendency to communicate with each other is probably based on our primitive instincts. I recently heard that women were the likely inventors of verbal language. It wasn’t so long ago in our evolution that we females were in charge of sitting around the fire outside the cave, preparing food, raising little cave-kids, and maybe complaining about the quality of meat our cave-mates were bringing home. Talking was probably more useful to women in sharing chores and instructing children. The men could point at a distant buffalo, grunt and start running. Once they killed it, they would drag it home, grunt and leave it for the women to cook. Maybe not, but I like to imagine it that way.

Cut to today, and we women are still inclined to talk a lot about the activities that make up our day. Few people would argue that we talk a lot more than men do. Do we “do” more than men? Maybe, maybe not. But we sure have more to say about it all.

Marketers have recognized the power of all this talking. Women spend a lot of time communicating about the things they buy and the places they shop, so it is wise to do whatever you can to make the most of this free advertising. Currently, word-of-mouth marketing, also known as viral marketing, is very much in vogue.

The important thing is making sure that if they are talking about your product or store, they have something good to say about it. Don’t disappoint. If they haven’t yet purchased your product, then they might be talking about how interested they are in checking it out.

Once they’ve visited your store or experienced your service, they might very well shift their discussion to the experience they had there. After all, the last thing they experienced is what they’re most likely to talk about, and the customer experience has now become an integral part of your product or service. It has to be a positive experience, or it may become the subject of their next chat session–but maybe not in the way you wanted.

Next blog: Shake, shake, shake

Delia Passi, Founder of WomenCertified® and author of Winning the Toughest Customer: The Essential Guide to Selling to Women is a regular columnist on eBrandMarketing. Want my take? Email me and visit my sites www.deliapassi.com, www.womencertified.com

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